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Topic: Pieces of O’bomb’ya’s Legacy (Read 1868 times)

Yearling U.S. President Obama was rewarded with an unearned Peace Prize in 2009 that he described at the time as not a, “recognition of my own accomplishments but rather an affirmation of American leadership on behalf of aspirations held by people in all nations”, and furthermore that he was, “at the beginning, and not the end, of my labors on the world stage.” He warned that the threat of modern terrorism and internal national destabilization would become more of a threat than the traditional threats nations posed to each other. He foresaw humanitarian wars for the sake of saving civilians and praised the humanitarian organizations that intervene. He described with uncanny precision that, “The resurgence of ethnic or sectarian conflicts; the growth of secessionist movements, insurgencies, and failed states -- all these things have increasingly trapped civilians in unending chaos.” These were no words thrown to the wind, the Presidency that he has presided over since has served these purposes with intent: to use terrorism to destabilize foreign nations; to use the guise of humanitarian organizations to intervene in the affairs of foreign nations; to hype-up ethnic and sectarian conflicts at home and abroad; to push and pull secessionists and insurgencies at home and abroad to the point where nation states fail. [1][2]

Now with two weeks left in his Presidency, the full scope of foolishness in awarding Barack Obama the Orwellian Peace Prize can be wholly appreciated, the heavy hypocrisy of its charge hangs on his grey-haired neck like a donkey’s yoke hitched-up to haul around this peaceless legacy. He’s been at war longer than any other President in US history. He’s added nearly half a dozen wars to US foreign policy while keeping Bush’s old bonfires burning. He’s killed more people with drone strikes than his predecessor by six to seven times; his predecessor who rightly received vicious criticism from so many of the Democrats that supported Obama and who’ve gone silent since, save their recent public bouts of Trump derangement syndrome. The Peace Prize winner has also tragically continued the decades old American practice of arming, funding and training terrorists to destabilize foreign sovereign nations. All of this while still besting his own best numbers for bombs-dropped the year he’s bailing out of office. [3][4][5][6]

But who exactly has he been bombing and why have powerfully connected geo-political think tanks like the Council on Foreign Relations been calling for alliances between al Qaeda groups and the violent Islamists dubbed ‘moderate’ by those war-exporting monsters that like to arm them both and have proxies do their dirty work for them? Despite having top of the line, super-pricy smart weapons to drop from hyper-bad bombers and fighter-bombers piloted by highly trained aerial artists serving in the World’s only super power that too often indiscriminately cost civilian foreign nationals their lives and cost US tax payers the petrodollars that the decades of bombing the Middle East has propped-up the value of; despite all of this the US airstrikes have not targeted their supposed enemies very well, a criticism dismissed by White House defenders with the need for more boots of the ground to get better intelligence, but boots on the ground have been caught there in numerous instances despite President saying the contrary for years. And the US Military under Barack Obama has bombed lots of ISIS, lots, but lots of others contenders too, only it’s more others than ISIS sometimes, enough of the time to make any thinking person wonder if Obama’s numerous pledges to destroy ISIS aren’t the primary reason he’s taken up his warmongering yoke overseas. Stack that on the back of the recent audio clip staring Secretary of State Kerry that lays waste to the notion that Syrian national sovereignty ever mattered to the Obama Administration. As many have pointed out, alike Libya where the goal was ousting Gaddafi and using the crisis as a means to preordained solutions – deriving order out of designed chaos - the goal was ousting Assad, while ISIS, Nusra, and any ‘moderate’ head-chopping Wahabi hobby-horses saddled along the way were merely vehicles to besiege that elected government and float the international community’s aim at another of the five countries Bush’s mission missed in his seven years of reign. [7][8][9][10]

A senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, analyzing the Department of Defense’s data released two days ago that described America’s dominant role in the NATO-GCC coalition’s efforts to combat international terrorism, tallied the number of bombs dropped like this,

“In President Obama’s last year in office, the United States dropped 26,171 bombs in seven countries. This estimate is undoubtedly low, considering reliable data is only available for airstrikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya, and a single “strike,” according to the Pentagon’s definition, can involve multiple bombs or munitions. In 2016, the United States dropped 3,027 more bombs—and in one more country, Libya—than in 2015.

Most (24,287) were dropped in Iraq and Syria….

Of the total 30,743 bombs that the coalition dropped, then, the United States dropped 24,287 (79 percent of 30,743).” [11]

Of note, the US hasn’t made an Official Congressional Declaration of War against any of the seven countries the US’s currently bombing, nor any of the terrorist groups. The bombs are dropped and legal consent given to the military to do so, based on an interpretation of the 2001 and 2002 Authorization to use Military Force as levied against terrorism in general that Obama tried in 2015 to get Congress to replace with an equally hollow and symbolic AUMF targeting ISIS. The difference between the two, a Declaration of War and an AUMF, is significant and it would be significantly magnified due to the specific nature of the threat: AUMF’s don’t have specific provisions that prohibit allies of the US from aiding the same terrorists that the AUMF’s supposed to aggress. Official Declarations of War have those specific taboos and would’ve obstructed so many of the US’s frenemies – some of the coalition members have shamelessly confessed - from nakedly arming our supposed enemies. [12]

But, back to the story of the bombs and to whom they were addressed.

As early as February last year there were fairly big news sources asking pointed questions about civilian casualties but they were often dismissed with cooked-down numbers. USA Today carried a very detailed piece outlining numerous cases throughout 2015 and 2014 and they came to the conclusion that the White House was lying about killing. The article revealed the stunning disparity between Washington math and other more independently sourced varieties,

“Taking all the published investigations so far, the U.S. military acknowledges causing the sum total of 21 civilian deaths in the campaign against the Islamic State. Such a low number is wildly implausible. Airwars, an independent monitoring group that tracks allegations of civilians casualties, says that at least 862 and as many as 1,190 non-combatants have died in coalition strikes in Iraq and Syria….

The head of Airwars, Chris Woods, says the “smart bombs” used by Western air forces have clearly reduced the risk to civilians on the battlefield. Nevertheless, he says that in Afghanistan, for example, more civilians died in airstrikes than were killed by foreign ground troops. Airpower was the single greatest cause of civilian death by international forces, killing one civilian for every 11 airstrikes.” [13]

A tailored and tip-toeing annual report released by the White House in mid’ 2016 merely corroborated USA Today’s earlier estimation that the Administration was pruning the data to make things look rosy. From the July 1, 2016, The New York Times snip-it about it titled “U.S. Reveals Death Toll From Airstrikes Outside War Zones” peddled it this way,

“The official civilian death count is far lower than estimates compiled by independent organizations that try to track what the government calls targeted killings, and human rights groups expressed doubts about the reliability of the government’s numbers. Most of the strikes have been carried out by drones in chaotic places like Libya, tribal Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, though a small number have involved traditional aircraft or cruise missiles….

The administration’s count of civilian deaths is about half of the lowest estimate from independent watchdogs…” [14]

The number of US and coalition airstrikes on non-coalition combatants engaged against US and collation proxies soared as 2016 drew to a close as well. Simply put the US coalition had been targeting Syrian, Iraqi, Lebanese, and Iranian troops with precision guided munitions and finely resolving satellite directed intel in attacks that lasted for an hour in one case wherein the airstrikes were precisely coordinated with an ISIS attack on that same Syrian Army position. This was the infamous strike on Der EzZor, and while it was probably the most egregious and obvious case of the US and the coalition targeting their admitted primary enemy in the region, it was only one instance among many. There’re other occasions where the US even bombed Iraqi troops during a preplanned coalition assault against ISIS, effectively acting as ISIS’s Air Force in Iraq as well as Syria. One occasion in Iraq that matched the violent recklessness of Der EzZor, [15][16][17]

“An Iraqi army military source told Sputnik Arabic that 90 Iraqi soldiers and a further 100 wounded by the US Air Force in Mosul, where currently Iraqi forces are fighting ISIS.

According to the Factiniraq news portal, the airstrike also damaged Iraqi military hardware, and the troops had to retreat from the area.” [18]

Of course these events have been concurrently occurring with what seems to seeing eyes to be a concerted campaign by the US to air drop arms and supplies to ISIS. These reports, though numerous and varied in origins are uniformly dismissed by White House apologists and pro-Iraq War, pro-Syrian regime change neocons; dismissed primarily as a series of otherwise unrelated mistakes despite their common means and methods stretching back years. [19][20][21]

All of this has been reported ad nauseam by independent news sources for all these many years that it’s been reportedly happening, but the reports receive only well-rehearsed rebuttals from defenders of the atrophying political structures of both parties in the US; both bent on years of regime change and still salty that Syria survived their best laid plans; the same ragged remnants of both political structures Never-Trumping around like playground losers who can’t accept that these issues like so many other failed bi-partisan efforts handed from administration to administration like a racing baton in a globe-rounding medley were part of the reasons Americans rejected this endlessly devilish international interventionism – ‘Americanism not globalism will be our credo!’ Many Americans rejected our former foreign policies and so many of those war-exporting experts whose past practices could hardly be described in words that don’t include pathological definitions of what’s gone wrong with the leaders of the Western World: reportedly four million dead Muslims since 1990; nearly two million of them were Iraqi alone; probably more than 500 thousand dead Syrians and how many millions and millions of Syrian, Libyans, Iraqis, Afghanis, Pakistanis, and Yemenis have been forced from their own countries to tragically flee to the nations that were so instrumental in down fall of the nations from which they’re fleeing. There are numerous descriptions of this unkind kind of depravity by some of the best writers that humankind has produced but one speaks to the delusions and violent grandiosity here more clearly than most in regards to our departing President who jokes about how good he is at killing people by remote and by proxy while many of this most ardent sycophants and supporters blasphemously label him their messiah and ‘Our Lord and Savior’,

"Kill one man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill them all, and you are a god." - Jean Rostand, Thoughts of a Biologist, 1938.

12) “Declarations of War and Authorizations for the Use of Military Force: Historical Background and Legal Implications”, Jennifer K. Elsea and Matthew C. Weed; Congressional Research Service, April 18, 2014https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL31133.pdf